Ramblings About My Life..

Chronicles Of The Flying Carcinoma

I've almost achieved legendary status in my Integrated Learning Activity group by doing something so insidious during our dissection section that the mere mention of it should never be allowed to taint humanity - but I'm going to write about it here anyway. For the faint-hearted, this is your final chance to click on the tiny little "X" at the top right hand corner of your computer display if you're a conformist and you use Microsoft Windows (for the "rebels" who use a Mac, the little red circle on the top right hand corner of the screen should do it) and back away from reading all about it. I will also make it very clear that I DO NOT, in any way, condone the reproduction of this event nor do I encourage the use of it as inspiration for others to pioneer a "see-who-does-the-most-digustingly-interesting-yet-morbidly-funny-thing-during-dissection" competition, "star search" or even, Heaven forbid, a reality television show.

The date on which it happened was last Tuesday, the 7th of March, 2006 Anto Domini. Like many insidious events before this, it had a pretty inoccous beginning, although the weather that day bore portents of a terrible event in the making. The skies were overcast, chilly winds were making leaves dance and a dawn drizzle gently shed its delicate tears onto the cold sidewalks. To be completely honest, I enjoy bad weather and I'm actually in a better mood the worse the weather gets - but for sake of dramatization, I'll just pretend that I saw bad omens in the weather. Dissection practicals were held that morning in the Dissecting Rooms as always, although the session was briefly interrupted by a fire alarm. We usually hear the fire alarms go off during dissection practicals since they test the fire alarms every Tuesday - so we didn't pay much heed to it at first.

However, when the fire alarms persisted, we were chivvied downstairs to the evacuation assembly area by our demonstrators. Once there, we spent around 20 minutes shivering in the cold in our lab coats and speculating whether there really was a fire or not before being allowed back into the building. It's really ironic how they test the fire alarms to ensure our safety, but doing so makes our response to the fire alarms less urgent - if a fire occured on a Tuesday morning in the Biomedical Science Building, would the five minutes we spent listening to the fire alarms ring thinking that they were just testing the alarms have cost the entire Half Class A their lives? Anyway, after getting thoroughly refreshed by our little jog down the stairs, we returned to the Dissection Room and proceeded with our work.

Since we're currently in the Gastrointestinal/Liver Module, our to-do list that day was to cut open a cadaver's abdominal region and observe (read - cut out) the abdominal viscera. I did most of the cutting that day, and it all proceeded rather smoothly until we reached the small intestines. There, we found a small and anomalous lump embedded in our cadaver's mesentery. True to Group 1's Doctrine of Dissection - if it's unknown, slice it out and we'll find out what it is, or not - I duly sliced it out and passed it around to my group members. When we showed it to our demonstrator and asked her about what it was, it turned out that it was a lymphoma - cancer in one of the lymph nodes of the mesentery. One of my group members took it and removed the layers of connective tissue covering the surface until she finally had a hard, spherical object.

We were even more puzzled about this than our initial discovery of the lump. It was so hard that even pressing a scapel onto it could only just scratch its surface but not cut it into half - we thought carcinomas were just lumps of tissue! Our demonstrator came to our rescue again, and she told us that sometimes carcinomas can become calcified, which is probably what happened to the lump that we were then passing around. When it reached me, I took it in one hand (since one of my gloves was removed after I was done dissecting in order for me to hold my pen and write) and gave it a gentle squeeze between my thumb and forefinger to see how hard it was. However, to my utmost horror, it slipped out of my fingers and shot upwards like a slippery melon seed. I could only stare in disbelief as it arced upwards, stayed suspended in midair of a couple of femtoseconds and hurtled downwards with a vengeance.

It wouldn't have been so bad if it landed on a floor - it would have been embarrassing, yes, but it wouldn't have been a thing that everyone in my group would probably remember forever. The flying carcinoma, however, landed in my group's demonstrator's HAIR. OMFG. Since I was standing behind her, she didn't know what had happened. There was a moment of dead silence when everyone in my group stared at me with their mouths agape. I was equally shocked as well and could only reach forward and removed the lump from the demonstrator's hair with trembling hands after a couple of seconds had passed and I was done staring in disbelief at what had transpired. The abrupt silence told our demonstrator that something was wrong and she turned around to see me standing stock-still, wide-eyed and staring at the lump in my hand.

Apparently she didn't realize that something terrible had happened. She looked at me, then looked at everyone (who were still deathly silent) before asking "Is something the matter?". As if a spell was lifted from the rest of my group members, they burst out in side-splitting laughter in unison. I decided to break the bad news to her since it was my fault and I told her what had happened and that it was all my fault, it was totally unintentional and I was really truly sorry. She took the news rather well - she just laughed and asked if I had removed all of it from her hair. I replied in the affirmative and took a piece of tissue paper to clean the landing zone of the carcinoma for good measure. She then assured me that it was alright and that she washed her hair everyday anyway, so it was no big deal. Amazing. If it had happened to me instead, I'd be placing my head under the nearest washbasin and spend the next hour scrubbing my hair.

We then proceeded with the rest of our dissection practical with no other major mishaps. After dissection, some members of my group looked at me and said "YC, YC..." before bursting out in laughter. Hahaha! Well, it was my fault after all, so I accept all ragging and jokes resulting from this incident with absolutely no hard feelings at all. However, they didn't take the mickey out of me as much as I had thought they would...thankfully! Anyway, I hope that this incident hasn't put off the demonstrator from having our group again for our next dissection practical - she's really good compared to our previous demonstrator and I hope she stays as our demonstrator. What have I learnt from this event? To not squeeze carcinomas with two fingers ever again - goodness knows where it's going to land the next time!

posted by yong chen @ 8:28 PM